A classic beltway tale: once upon a time, if a vaudeville act was so horrible,
audience members would heckle it right off the stage, and maybe target it with
a few rotten vegetables. But in Washington, despite scathing reviews, watchdog
investigations and bare-knuckle insults from lawmakers who hold the purse, Uncle
Sam will continue funding a politically insulated program billions of dollars
each year, even if lives are at risk.

Thus, the story of JIEDDO (Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization),
which, despite getting a total of $21 billion in taxpayer funds over the last
seven years, has been accused of chronic mismanagement, redundancy, secrecy,
and worst of all, largely failing at its core
mission, which is to “focus (lead, advocate, coordinate) all Department
of Defense actions in support of the Combatant Commanders’ and their respective
Joint task forces’ efforts to defeat IEDs as weapons of strategic influence.”

We cannot tell you the full range of JIEDDO initiatives funded to fulfill this
goal because year after year government oversight investigations have been stymied
by the lack of transparency, with the Government Accountability Office (GAO)
saying in 2010 that JIEDDO had not yet developed a means for reliably measuring
the overall effectiveness of its efforts and investments to combat IEDs. As
recently as a year ago, GAO
complained again that it could not study the "universe" of counter-IED
programs at the Department of Defense because JIEDDO "does not consistently
record and track this data."

According to a report by the Center for Public Integrity in 2012, JIEDDO went
from a staff of 360 in 2006 to a "monster" of 1,900 personnel – many
of them contractors from the usual Beltway Banditry that’s been feasting upon
the multi-billion dollar budget for years. One would think they have the resources
to pull together a working database. But in a scathing McClatchy News/Center
for Public Integrityreport in 2011 called "The
Manhattan Project that Bombed," it was suggested – by GAO – that perhaps
JIEDDO purposefully ignored certain data, because "they would not demonstrate
effectiveness."

Well, we can tell you what we do know about JIEDDO’s effectiveness:
IED’s remain the most potent killer of soldiers and civilians on the battlefield
in Afghanistan today. Ironically, it’s a JIEDDO spokesman in the field in Afghanistan
who told
reporters as recently as July 25 that "insurgents are able to invest
more time in preparing and staging an attack, and when we see an effective attack,
it tends to be more lethal to our forces.” Meanwhile, JIEDDO says attacks on
coalition troops from April to June were
down 17 percent from the same period last year. Imagine, only 4,092 attacks
(we’re assuming this means incidents, including detonated and non-detonated
IEDs) in three months, according to longtime USA Today reporter Tom Vanden
Brook. But get this – IED attacks on Afghan soldiers and police went up 93
percent in the same period. This is a no-brainer: international forces have
not only been shrinking in size because of the drawdown, but they’ve been letting
Afghans take the lead against the IED-savvy insurgency. Thus, their casualty
rate has skyrocketed over the last year.

And we call that progress.

Afghan civilians are also taking the brunt of the IED problem that was supposed
to be thwarted over the last seven years, and in the words of a recent JIEDDO
slide
briefing, there’s still "a tough road ahead." According to United
Nations report
released on July 31, civilian casualties in Afghanistan are up 23 percent, reversing
last year’s decline, the factors largely driving the spike being the indiscriminate
use of roadside bombs and suicide attacks in major population centers.

Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-CA., a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, said it quite
simply two years ago: "so as long as the IED metric keeps going up, and
as long as we keep taking the majority of our (killed in action) casualties
from IEDs, then they’ve (JIEDDO initiatives) all been unsuccessful. Period."
Well the casualty metric for US troops may going down, as we’ve explained
above, but IEDs still account for 64 percent of American deaths and wounds,
according to JIEDDO’s own recent reporting.

"It’s quite clear that (JIEDDO) and its general approach to the problem
is a waste of time and money," said Winslow Wheeler, a budget expert with
the Center for Defense Information, which is part of the Project on Government
Oversight (POGO) in Washington.

"It’s certainly important to develop technology to help our tactics but
their fundamental approach of ‘let’s throw money at this and it will solve the
problem,’ has been, yet again, a complete failure," he told Antiwar.com.

The writing is on the wall, but Congress has been loath to jigger with JIEDDO’s
budget up until now. Who wants to be seen as getting stingy with programs designed
to save the troops from roadside bombs? But there is a movement afoot to use
the new spirit of military draw-downs and cut backs to finally put what has
been called, appropriately so, a "slush fund" on the old chopping
block, or at least, leaving it up to DoD, which we’re told is fully prepared
to do the deed.

Nestled in the massive National Defense Authorization Act for 2014 that just
passed the House, is a requirement that DOD decide whether to love JIEDDO or
leave it. Congress wants to see plans on their desks within 60 days, outlining
the future of the organization after the NDAA is signed. Word
is, members are ready to go along with defense plans, already in the works,
to either eliminate JIEDDO altogether, break it up and absorb its parts into
the different branches of service, or create a scaled down version, at a quarter
of the cost, under the Secretary of Defense’s office.

This appears to be the beginning of the end of a beltway boondoggle of massive
proportions – and questionable ethical virtue – as we know it. For years, JIEDDO,
according to the GAO itself – which on merit doesn’t operate on emotion or politics,
but along established "just the facts ma’am" guideposts – has noted
a pattern of obfuscation, along with "breaking its own rules" in regards
to spending, to the point that GAO couldn’t tell whether the blizzard of anti-IED
initiatives was even working, how many there, or where most of the money was
even going.

Furthermore, the technological "magic bullet" was never found, rather
JIEDDO ended up deploying old tech updated for current wars, like vehicles outfitted
with mine rollers, which
have their origins in World War II.

Marine Corps using Mine Rollers in Afghanistan

All along, soldiers and civilians have been dying or suffering from life-changing
wounds. As Wheeler tells Antiwar.com, "they keep on ballyhooing how many
lives JIEDDO has saved but the question is, how many lives did they cost us?"

In other words, how much time and energy was wasted while JIEDDO was lavishing
big bucks on flash-in-the-pan ideas, like this doozy,
a "miracle weapon" that promised to destroy IEDs by harnessing lightning
bolts. This contraption was funded $30 million before JIEDDO was forced to admit
it never worked.

Meanwhile, much of the stuff that does work are your tried and true
tools of the trade: the aforementioned mine rollers, handheld metal detectors,
bomb-sniffing dogs, network centric intelligence, culvert covers, surveillance
blimps – they’re effective, but they are they really worth billions in research
& development funding? We think not.

And yes there has been new, successful technology deployed in the field – like
jammers that can disrupt cell phone bomb triggers, or mobile robots that deactivate
IEDs – but they were developed by JIEDDO based on research already conducted
by previous task forces, according to critics who say JIEDDO spent too much
on fielding contractor start ups rather than focusing on a few ideas that could
work.

But sadly, even the good tactics have proven not enough for the insurgents,
who have responded to each new device with even more lethal and unpredictable
adaptations.
In 2012, based on numerous reports from troops and embeds in the field, this
writer published, "Tell
the Truth Already," which detailed the new trend in "dismounted
complex blast injuries," the new "signature wound among troops."
Insurgents were planting so many of these new IEDs in the ground, which were
everywhere and difficult to detect, that soldiers were banking their sperm before
deployments. Why? Because the devices exploded up – often ripping apart soldiers’
legs and genitals and even their internal organs. Again, JIEDDO did not come
through. I wrote:

… why hadn’t JIEDDO been able to get American troops the pelvic armor the Brits
have been wearing since 2010? Why did it take this long to "push through"
the bureaucracy for an emergency shipment of 45,000 ballistic overgarments and
another 165,000 antimicrobial boxers (protective gear that parents were starting
to order themselves for their soldiers in Afghanistan)?

JIEDDO actually blamed the delay, which was finally overcome in December,
on a slow procurement process, and "the lack of battle-tested, American-made
protection units," according to reporter Jeremy Schwartz for the American-Statesman,
Feb. 20. Is this what $21 billion buys these days?

Yes, since one of JIEDDO responsibilities is to "rapidly provide counter-IED
capabilities in support of combatant commanders through rapid acquisition,"
it would seem it failed miserably on this score.

A year before, despite then-Gen. David Petraeus’s efforts to put lipstick on
a pig, we
detailed the 120 percent increase of amputations among wounded soldiers
from 2009 to 2010, and the 40 percent increase of IED fatalities year over year.
Yet Petraeus was telling reporters in September 2010 that Taliban use of IEDs
had flattened. We know now that deaths actually peaked
in 2010 to 368.

Furthermore, we’ve read numerous accounts of soldiers using their own
ingenuity to combat the threat. Like Army Reservist Cpl. Eric DeHart, an engineer
by trade, who eventually decided to design
a steel contraption that could be shoved inside any size culvert, denying
what had become a useful spot for planting IEDs. It seemed to work, and his
plans were sent to other units in southern Afghanistan.

Yeah, it worked so well, that the US government decided to pay Afghan contractors
$32 million to start planting the "culvert denial systems" in some
2,500 locations. But a recent inspector general’s report warned that there was
not enough documentation or oversight to determine whether those contractors
ever followed through. In fact, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan
(SIGAR) warned
late last year that a number of gratings on a major highway frequented by
US troops were never installed.

"The loss of life because individuals were not doing their job is horrific
and unacceptable," said SIGAR John Sopko in
July.

"This case shows so clearly that fraud can kill in Afghanistan. We will
find out if contracting officers did not do their job and if that proves to
be true and Americans have died, we will hold those individuals accountable."

Many would say it’s too late. Somehow it is even harder to stomach JIEDDO when
you see the failures in such stark relief. Wheeler blames the Congress, for
believing all along that throwing money at technological gizmos would resolve
the problem.

"Because of their feeblemindedness, they couldn’t think their way out
of it and come up with a more effective alternative solution to the land mine
problem," Wheeler noted. "So they were caught in a trap, thinking
‘oh, if we are found reducing the money someone will attack us for not supporting
the troops.’"

[…] A classic beltway tale: once upon a time, if a vaudeville act was so horrible, audience members would heckle it right off the stage, and maybe target it with a few rotten vegetables. But in Washington, despite scathing reviews, watchdog investigations and bare-knuckle insults from lawmakers who hold the purse, Uncle Sam will continue funding a politically insulated program billions of dollars each year, even if lives are at risk. http://original.antiwar.com/vlahos/2013/08/05/congress-finally-getting-wise-to-jieddo/#.UgEX749LlRs.&#8230; […]

You will all get a kick (in the teeth) out of this true tale: a friend in Augusta, GA, was working as an IT specialist for a defense contractor at Fort Gordon, approaching the end of her term. Still needing a paycheck, she asked about other jobs, but none were locally available for her skills. HOWEVER, the contractor helpfully steered her towards another job which might utilize her skills as a metal detector hobbyist. Yes, folks, they made her an IED detection specialist and sent her off to Afghanistan – to train Marines, no less – to the tune of 18K A MONTH. Now, she had ZERO prior military (much less ordnance) experience, but hey, as they say – the lady was willing. THAT'S the JIEDDO for you. Lord knows how much the bloodsuckers billed Uncle Sam, if she was getting paid that much. But hey, at least her contract is over next month (new FY). For the sake of the taxpayer, let's hope such fraud, waste and abuses as this are all finally coming to an end.

No discussion of how difficult it is to prevent a hidden bomb from exploding and no mention of why our forces are even wrangling with roadside bombs. Iraq and Afghanistan were IED messes – and so will the next GWOT expedition – because we lack the national will to prosecute wars circa 1945. The more we care about what the world thinks of us, the worse it gets. Worth mentioning that Japan's a great ally.

I think if jieddo had a chance to field a working prototype that would work to find ieds efp mines pressure plate battery pack tripwire primer cord booby trap and do this on any terrain at 60 or 80 feet away from blast zone and stay in middle of road or area they jieddo would be interested not so jieddo rejected this on february 12 2013 this mecm mine explosive clearing machine this design would cost about 50,ooo dollars
I think there is a lot of money in ieds efp mines
ALL IS NOT BEING DONE THAT COULD BE DONE FORE ARE TROOPS

JIEDDO still has no method of demonstrating effectiveness. Its an organization full of egos and beauracracy that struggles to try and take credit for the work the common analytic contractor does on its behalf while giants such as Lockheed (one of the biggest beneficiaries of JIEDDO) use internal consultants to persuade leadership to continue to purchase enormously expensive and useless products, analytics and services. JIEDDO could do good things but it has to fundamentally re-think how it aids the DOD and how it can prove effectiveness before wasting millions on IT and contractor services.

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, a Washington, D.C.-based freelance writer, is a longtime
political reporter for FoxNews.com and
a contributing editor at The American Conservative.
She is also a Washington correspondent for Homeland Security Today magazine. Her Twitter account is @KelleyBVlahos.